The still rather new WordPress Page Builder Elementor already has over 900,000 active installations. I took a look at this whizkid for you.

This month, the design tool by Pojo Me Digital Ltd., which started out as a page builder, is celebrating its second anniversary. Since then, the plugin has established itself and became one of the market leaders in this rather overseeable branch.

By now, Elementor is more than a pure page builder, as it is also able to design areas of your site that have not been in your reach without coding before. Thus, calling it a real Theme Builder is legitimate.

Since this advanced functionality is exclusive to the premium version called Elementor Pro 2, however, we’ll take a closer look at the page builder features first. I’ll get back to the Theme Builder later.

Page Builder Plugins, the Homepage Builders for WordPress

Page builders for WordPress have a lot in common with the concept of the classic homepage builder, but they’re prepared for being used within the world’s most popular CMS. As usual, you click together pages element by element and fill these elements with content. This doesn’t require any coding knowledge, and no design knowledge either. Both are helpful, though.

Page builders are not to be confused with themes, although they fulfill the same task by principle. While a theme is a static template for giving a consistent frame for your content with very limited customizability via the WordPress customizer, a page builder provides far more flexibility regarding the design and presentation of your content.

As you can tell by the name, page builders let you build WordPress pages, but not posts. Page builders are only to be used for the static parts of your website. Further down, you’ll see how Elementor got rid of this limitation.

In order to complete the confusion, it should be mentioned that you still need a theme to be able to use a page builder. Some WordPress theme bundles come with their own builders built in. The WordPress default themes are a good fit. The makers of Elementor even offer a basic template as a foundation.

That’s not all, though. In Elementor’s library, you can choose from more than 100 themes, specifically made to be used in the Elementor design tool.

Elementor: From 0 to 900,000 Installations in Two Years

In 2016 Elementor started under the open source license which was pretty uncommon for this kind of plugin. Thus, I wasn’t surprised that Elementor got a lot of attention and goodwill right off the bat, especially since the developer promised that nothing would change about the project being available for free.

The development advanced quickly. New features were implemented week after week. Now, the scope of functions leaves little to be desired. For a while now, Pojo has also been offering a commercial version of the Page Builder, called Elementor Pro. Since then, new features have been developed for both the free and the commercial version. It seems like Pojo is set to keep their promise. The free version keeps getting supplied with new features.

Theme developers can integrate the free version into their offers, while the pro version can only be purchased by the end user. Pojo is not only the developer of Elementor but is also a key player in the distribution of premium turn-key themes. Logically, the company integrates their own Page Builder into each of their themes.

Elementor: Installation and Commissioning

Elementor is installed just like every other plugin. As it is available in the WordPress plugin repository, you can actually install and activate it right from within your site’s backend. Currently, since June of 2018, version 2.0.16 is the most recent one.

On the left side, in the page navigation, you’ll find a menu item called Elementor. This is where you change global settings, and where you have access to all templates you set up. Maintenance tools and system information regarding the most critical parameters of your WordPress environment round off the feature set.

Elementor’s Catchy Interface Concept

Pushing the mentioned button on articles or pages opens a fullscreen editing window.

Elementor in action while working on a page. (Screenshot: Noupe)

The underlying theme’s design elements are displayed unedited, and uneditable. In the shown example, all changes that can be made with Elementor only affect the space dedicated to the page. This allows you to enhance pages in a way that was only known from print magazines before.

Access the templates right from within the editor. (Screenshot: Noupe)

If you’re missing out on ideas, choose one of the over 100 ready-to-use templates. This approach is also recommended for newbies, as each template is entirely editable once it has been implemented. This allows you to learn which results are possible while working on the living object. You can get an overview of all available templates in the Template Library.

Elementor comes with a whole bunch of professional templates. (Screenshot: Noupe)

Aside from the default features, such as adding text, images, or videos, Elementor also provides you with a wide range of additional elements, also known as widgets. These include accordions, sliders, carousels, media integrations, tabs, and more. You’re also able to access WordPress standards, such as the latest posts, most recent comments, and so forth.

As soon as a design finally meets your demands, you can test it in different resolutions via a small screen icon at the bottom right. Desktop, tablet, and smartphone are available, and Elementor sticks to the conventional breakpoints, such as 360 pixels for smartphones, for instance.

If you want the layout to break out of the theme’s default limitations, you have to head to the page attributes, and select the value “Elementor Canvas” instead of the default value “Default Template”.

With the help of the community, Elementor got translated into more than 50 languages, putting it into the top ten of the most translated WordPress plugins.

I’m especially impressed by two recent new additions that almost revolutionize the feature set of the Page Builder. One of them is called History and provides a full-fledged undo/redo and revision history. This is especially handy as soon as you notice a mistake you made quite some time ago. Instead of having to start over, you simply make use of Elementor’s undo, and reset the project to the last version before the error. Redo, on the other hand, lets you repeat an action.

The second innovation is Inline Editing. In Elementor wording, inline editing means that you’re able to create and edit text right from the frontend. This way, you get a much better feel for the look of your content, and you’ll catch yourself trying to realize (typo)graphic ideas more often than before.

What Happens When You Deactivate Elementor?

Page Builders belong to the group of plugins that you can’t just uninstall. Of course, nothing is stopping you from doing so, but you’ll undoubtedly be wondering what happened to your website’s design soon afterward.

Most Page Builders on the market work with shortcodes that they embed in contents. If you deinstall this kind of plugin, all shortcodes remain, but don’t make sense to WordPress anymore, destroying your contents as a result. Other plugins don’t leave their shortcodes behind, but also take all content that was created within the builder with them.

Elementor is a very commendable representative of its kind. While you do lose the entire layout upon uninstallation of Elementor, the contents remain as pure HTML. This doesn’t look as good as before anymore, but it still works.

If you think that a page builder generates a layout that continues to exist regardless of this page builder, you’re wrong. Thus, the decision for a page builder is crucial, as a switch is not all that easy either.

That’s because page builders aren’t themes, but plugins. Here, a framework with no static foundation, like a theme would have, is kept up for the runtime. Looking at it that way, page builders don’t build pages, but more a presentation framework that is applied when needed.

The statement that page builders would work with any theme out there is to be taken with a grain of salt. Of course, this statement is only meant to lower the inhibition level, suggesting that choosing such a product does not result in a long-term attachment. This is not unreservedly correct. You just have to try it.

More and more theme developers bundle their themes with a page builder. This looks highly comfortable at first, but, aside from the mentioned disadvantages, it also means that users of these combinations move outside of the WordPress standard, making them less flexible in dealing with the system.

Designers will rightfully criticize the fact that page builders always have their own design philosophy. Handling these attachments doesn’t have much to do with handling WordPress. It’s not consistent either. Design decisions made by the WordPress team for a good reason are thrown overboard. All users depend on their trust in the plugin creator to design a good usability. This trust is warranted for Elementor, though.

Fortunately, the risk of running into dealbreakers is low for Elementor, as the plugin’s basic version is available for free. This allows for in-depth testing before your final decision. Please don’t test it on your live website, but use something along the lines of WP-Staging to create a test environment.

Conclusion: Page Builder? Elementor

In comparison to others of its kind, Elementor is one of the tops in many regards. You have to keep in mind that switching between different Page Builders comes with a lot of effort. For instance, you’ll lose the layout if you decide to stop using Elementor or any competitor at one point.

Still, I wouldn’t say that Elementor was a bad choice. The opposite is the case. The decisive considerations are of a general nature. Do you want to use a Page Builder or not? As soon as you decide to use one, Elementor could be the plugin of your choice. With the new theme builder from Elementor Pro 2, the solution has become even more attractive – more on that in a bit.

Enthusiastic feedback on Elementor.com (Screenshot: Noupe)

This evaluation can be verified by the user feedback on the web. Criticism regarding Elementor is pretty rare, while excitement and sympathy for the product are common. According to the developer, the most lauded features are the performance, the compatibility with existing themes, the variety of turnkey templates, and the flexible editing.

Extended Functionality With Elementor Pro

Aside from the free version, there is Elementor Pro, which targets potential power users with its exclusive features. Elementor Pro is an extension to the free plugin, and can simply be added on top of the free variant. From there, you can seamlessly continue to work on your designs, while having additional features available to you.

With the Pro version, comfortable ways to integrate WooCommerce elements into Elementor layouts become available. This is not possible in the free version. On top of that, you gain access to the steadily growing number of widgets that affect the entire site, such as the Search Widget, or the Menu Widget. The widget Animated Headline, which lets you use the popular text flip effect which allows you to exchange normally fixed text components, as well as the live form editor, are also exclusive to pro users. If you need more details about the differences between free and pro, you should visit this overview.

The menu widget in action. (GIF: Elementor)

The prices for the Pro version start at 49 USD in the personal plan for a one-year license on one domain. For 99 USD, you can use Elementor on three domains, while 199 USD gets you unlimited domains. The feature set is identical on all three plans. The one-year license means that you have access to all updates and support for one year. After that year, you can still continue to use that, then increasingly outdated version but won’t receive any more updates.

Elementor Pro 2 and the Theme Builder

Aside from the above-mentioned aspects, another unique benefit of Elementor is the high innovation speed of its development. It is very rare for a week to go by without any new features, templates, or other changes.

During April of this year, the developers launched the Elementor Theme Builder. It removes the limitation of a page builder to purely static content, allowing you to design areas that, without coding, you didn’t have access to before.

The Theme Builder also lets you build headers and footers, archives, and other overview pages, the search results, the 404, as well as the dynamic posts of your actual blog area; all visually.

To provide this, Elementor works with so-called Blocks. Blocks are ready-to-use content elements that you can adjust to your personal needs. The concept is somewhat reminiscent of Lego. Your edited blocks can then be saved as custom blocks, letting you slowly grow your own block collection, which will massively speed up your workflow. Out of the gate, Elementor’s Theme Builder comes with 235 finished blocks, covering the entire application range.

Elementor’s Blocks Concept. (Screenshot: Elementor)

I’m especially excited about the option to design dynamic blog content. For that, Elementor grants you access to the WordPress hooks that you would also use for coding. The dynamic preview, which can be filled with existing content, is convenient, making sure that your posts look good in the new design. This is hard to judge from just looking at one single post.

Using conditions, you define where your element will be applied. (Screenshot: Elementor)

Once completed, freely adjustable condition cascades allow you to choose where your freshly designed element, like your new header, should appear. You can even restrict designs to individual pages or posts, or other taxonomies. This enables you to design an entirely custom-made website, without having to write a single snippet of code.

The following video gives you an excellent first impression of what the theme builder’s capable of, although the presentation of the interactions necessary is a bit fast:

One thing the theme builder can’t do is to create a complete theme that you could then export, to sell it, for example. Thus, you always need a basic template to use as the foundation. But I mentioned that already.

The above-shown video is one of over 100 videos Elementor has produced as to support their users via YouTube. By now, their YouTube channel has close to 28,000 subscribers. Community support can be found in the dedicated Facebook group, the Elementor Community, which counts almost 19,000 members.

On top of all that, Pojo provides a complete code reference for Elementor, making the work of developers easier. About 70 plugins based on Elementor in some form or another, are proof of that idea’s success. In contrast to other page builders, Elementor is not a closed system, but more of an open standard that many can agree on. That’s always a good thing. This way, a project gains more long-term stability and grows faster.

To Buy or Not to Buy?

Let me put it this way; I bought Elementor Pro 2. I will use it to create client websites where the budget doesn’t fit the aspirations. This way, Elementor turns into my internal homepage building kit. The license allows explicitly for the creation of websites for third parties, so I’m in the clear. The alternative option would be using a dedicated website builder. But why should I bother? It is way more comfortable to use WordPress, which I already know well, in conjunction with a visual tool to speed up the workflow.

Dedicated WordPress hosting is the new black. The last five years saw a rapid rise in the numbers of providers that offer WordPress-focused hosting solutions. Pagely sticks out from this competition.

Pagely: The Fast Are The Enemy of The Slow

Why does Pagely stick out from the competition, you will undoubtedly ask. The answer is simple. They have twice as much experience as most of the others. Pagely started working with WordPress as a hosted solution in 2007 already, building a full-fledged business from it in 2009. It’s no exaggeration to say that they inspired a lot of their competitors to even enter the market in the first place.

Pagely: Landing Page (Screenshot: D. Petereit)

You are certainly right when you say that being the oldest one in any business doesn’t necessarily mean you have the best offer. As we have all learned from this new economy, today it’s not the big swallowing the small any longer, but the fast eating up the slow.

I can assure you, Pagely is not one of the slow. Their offers are more than just contemporary, and their expertise can hardly be topped by anyone else. Still, but that’s the case with all WordPress hosts out there, their offers are not for everyone. We see a market segmentation inside the dedicated hosting branch that leaves room for a lot of tailor-made packages.

Is Pagely For You?

That said, let’s determine where Pagely fits in in that world of managed WordPress hosting. Pagely is not for you if you run a small blog with a few hundred visitors a month. I wouldn’t even consider any visitor number that’s not six-figure as qualifying for being served by Pagely. Generally, the more visitors you have, the more resource-hungry services you run, the better suited Pagely’s offers are.

You can certainly run your private blog there, too. But I doubt you’d be willing to shell out the money the smallest plan with its monthly 299 USD would cost you. That’s not to say they are too expensive. It’s just that they focus on page owners that have a particular demand when it comes to performance, reliability and other core features. Pagely even has customers in the 20k USD per month segment.

This is where Pagely sees itself in the competition. (Illustration: Pagely)

Flavors of WordPress Hosting

WordPress hosting comes in different flavors. The only thing all the offers have in common is their dedication to WordPress. Should you be somewhat savvy in handling with the most popular CMS, you can imagine that this is only the lowest common denominator. WordPress hosting is about much more than just running an open source script solution. And that’s where the competition starts to separate into different levels of price and performance.

You can have a WP hosting on a shared server in one single data center location, or you can have your WP hosted in a cloud environment with seamlessly scalable server performance and flexible content distribution worldwide. You can be entirely responsible for all the side aspects of hosting, such as backups, caching, CDN and more, or you can have all these side aspects managed by your chosen WP host, too.

Pagely and the Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Pagely is a provider that takes all the pain points out of running a website. You don’t have to care for anything by yourself. It starts with the infrastructure.

Pagely runs on one of the most massive hardware infrastructures this globe has to offer, the Amazon Cloud. Built on Amazon Web Services, there is practically no limit in what Pagely can do. Even the most performance-hungry services can be reliably hosted.

Hosting is not static on AWS. Should you expect a spike in traffic you can just have your package boosted for a day or two, then fall back to what Pagely calls „resting heart rate.” It’s the nature of the AWS to be scalable in all directions. With Pagely you can make use of this flexibility for your own website.

Look Back in Anger: Cloud Hosting is the Future

I am not afraid to claim that cloud hosting is the future while conventional hosting will vanish over time. There is just no advantage to running a single physical server in a single physical data center location with a single physical network connection to a hopefully broadband interconnection.

I made my own painful experiences when the dot-com bubble burst around the year 2000. My provider went broke and pulled the power switch. I had my own physical server housed there, which was a standard offer these days. So I jumped into my car and drove a few hundred miles, armed with a screwdriver, to pull my hardware out of the data center and drive it somewhere else. I also remember times when harddisks or ram bars failed. This was all in all a very down-to-earth experience. Today, with server instances being mostly virtual clusters of power located here or there, I have much more faith and way less stress.

Depending on what size of a package you book with Pagely you can even determine the data center you want to be located in from thirteen centers around the globe. But even if you don’t, Pagely will make sure that your site is delivered through the fastest path to your customers.

Pagely’s Technology Stack Has You Covered

Pagely operates a full technology stack to ensure your site is fast and secure. This includes many of the side aspects we wrote about in our popular series on how to make WordPress sites blazingly fast. Pagely has put up a full slew of products to ensure you can stay totally calm and focus on the main aspects of your business which will almost never have anything to do with server administration.

Pagely’s Full Stack (Illustration: Pagely)

It doesn’t start with the hosting power of AWS. It starts with their DNS called PressDNS, a layer that has been installed to leverage latency and puts geo-based routing policies into place, reacting intelligently related to the visitor’s location. The PressCDN caches your static assets to accelerate load times. When it comes to the access to your site, Pagely’s Ares Gateway comes into effect. As a Nginx+Lua based platform, it serves as a gatekeeper with PressArmor, their security architecture, and PressCache, their server-level caching mechanism right behind it.

Once on WordPress-level, they support you with a service called PressThumb which dynamically compresses and resizes your images as needed. The single biggest impact on load times is achieved by the proper handling of media assets. Noupe readers have almost been indoctrinated with this wisdom over the last few years.

The PressFormance service is a statistics solution right inside your hosting package. It not only shows you universal analytics but goes deeper into the metrics of your WordPress application.

Running a development instance aka staging is also a service directly provided by Pagely. Backing your site up to Amazons S3 is done automatically. There is nothing left to wish for. Add to that all the bread-and-butter features such as SSL, dedicated IPs, automatic core upgrades and what not and you see a WordPress paradise unfolding right before your eyes. Needless to say that your WooCommerce store will also benefit big time.

Pagely: Customer Satisfaction Through Great User Experience

That’s the purely technical part, but there is still more to it. It’s also about the user experience in itself. Have you ever tried to configure a site using a basic cPanel installation? Have you ever thought that your expertise is twice as high as that of the phone support you just called? If you are in this business as long as I am, all this and more will still weigh heavy on your soul.

Atomic: Pagely’s Comfortable Backend. (Screenshot: Pagely)

With Pagely you can finally free yourself from it. All the configuration work regarding your sites is done via an interface named Atomic which is nowhere even close to the complicated shortcomings of a cPanel backend. Atomic is a joy to use and feels entirely intuitive – which it certainly isn’t. We are talking about server administration in the end. But it comes as close as possible…

The support is done by engineers only. Each support agent can help you with your problem, and the answer you get is a true one. This is at least the aspiration Pagely claims, and from what I read on the web I do not doubt that they live up to it.

Conclusion: Pagely Should be on Your List

The answer to the question of whether you should go for Pagely or not is easy as long as you neglect the associated cost. I doubt that you can find a better service anywhere out there. There will be some that are on par, but a better one will be hard to spot. So, reduced to this aspect the answer is yes.

Still, this doesn’t mean there is not a better one for you and your specific demands or your particular financial capabilities. If your service needs what Pagely offers, all is simple. If you can (or have to) go with less, search on and check the WordPress hosting landscape thoroughly. There is an offer for every need out there.

Are you fed up with your website’s design? Great! Then take a look at our ten fresh and free WordPress themes. Maybe, you’ll find your new dream theme. This way, your website can start the season with a refreshing new look.

Creativ Business is a multi-purpose theme. It even comes with a page builder, making the creation of new content much easier. Backgrounds, colors, headers, and the logo are adjustable to your needs as well. It comes with a neat slider.

This theme is sure to set you apart from your competition. It’s designed to be a blog or magazine theme, and already offers tons of features in the free version. These features include a post slider, five different blog layouts, color customization, 21 widget areas, and four page templates.

Magazine O is a new magazine theme with a customizable background, five unique widgets, custom colors, and the option to use your own logo. The many widget areas make it easy to adjust the theme to your imagination.

Bloomy clearly sets itself apart from the other themes. I’m not only talking about the attractive appearance, but also about the promised six months of priority support for the free version of the theme. Bloomy offers three different header styles, a post slider, a couple of layout options, as well as typography settings.

College Education is meant for educational institutions and all fields of adult education. It is flexible enough to be used for other purposes, though. It’s prepared for the SiteOrigin page builder, which easily allows you to add new content. The colors, the header, as well as the logo can be customized.

Holland is a rather minimalistic blog theme. Its big advantage is the extensive customizability of the landing page. Additionally, you get to choose whether you want to display the sidebar on the left, the right, or not at all. As usual, the theme comes with adjustable backgrounds, colors, and a header.

When going for pure minimalism, this theme is just the one for you. It’s a good choice for bloggers, creative people, and as a portfolio. RichOne is already prepared for the Gutenberg Editor, set to be released with WordPress 5.

Conclusion

These templates would definitely help you to create newtly done webpages both personal and for businesses. This month, a lot of nice themes were added to the WordPress theme index. My personal favorites are PostMagazine, Bloomy, and Lookout. Which theme is your favorite?

Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get all essential WordPress services besides the actual hosting from one provider? The rather new solution by 10web offers just that.

WordPress: Much Light, But Also a Lot of Shadow

WordPress is as popular as ever. More and more websites of the modern web are powered by the CMS from Automattic. Among the readers of our sister magazine Dr. Web, the system is wildly popular as well. With a share of almost 40 percent, WordPress is as popular with our readers as it is with the rest of the world. No other CMS gets close to these levels.

The CMS Usage of Our Readers. (Screenshot: Noupe)

Today, when freelancers or small companies decide on a solution to get their own web presence going, this solution will be WordPress in most cases. Let’s not lie to ourselves, one of the reasons for that is the fact that WordPress is a free system, and the fact that there’s a giant ecosystem of free expansions, aka plugins, and turnkey designs, aka themes, surrounding it.

This basically lets us set up a highly functional website without having to pay a cent aside from the required webspace we get from our host of choice. So much for the theory.

In practice, the sheer size of the ecosystem comes with an extra effort that can quickly take a toll on your money. There’s a reason why our most popular articles are the ones where we recommend specific plugins, themes, or other services, regarding backups, for instance.

It’s almost impossible to keep up with the supply even when putting in a moderate effort. On top of that, there’s the problem that there are close to no quality checks. Thus, everyone can add extensions to the repository, leaving the sorting and the evaluation to the interested user.

Separating the wheat from the chaff is a tough job which is not just about taking your time for the process. It also takes a minimum amount of expert knowledge to judge which solution is the best for the application case at hand.

As if that wasn’t hard enough by itself, it is often accompanied by the problem that some themes don’t want to cooperate with some plugins, or some plugins don’t want to cooperate with other plugins, shutting down your site in the process.

10web: The Digital Threshing Machine for Your WordPress

Now, if there were a service provider that made all of these decisions easier by only offering high-quality, synergizing extensions, you’d save a ton of money. Disregarding the fact that your nerves would be under a lot less pressure as well.

10web: Landing Page (Screenshot: Noupe)

Within the Automattic empire, there is a solution said to provide all-round happiness. It is called Jetpack, and it’s a paid SaaS (Software as a Service) which can be managed for multiple domains from your dashboard.

10web, the service provider I want to introduce you to in the following, is a direct competitor that covers a broader range. 10web supplies a variety of over 60 function extensions and professional themes. On top of that, you receive essential additional services that exceed the pure plugin.

Let’s take a brief look at the most critical services:

SEO

I know that; is what you’ll think, and you’re right. But, in contrast to, e.g. Yoast, 10web’s SEO service does not end where it comes to the optimization of the content based on keywords. With 10web, you can also track keywords and search engine positions, always telling you your content’s current rank in the competition.

Backup

10web runs a cloud backup solution and automatically saves your WordPress website. If you don’t want your data to be stored in 10web’s cloud on Amazon S3, you can also set your own storage accounts, like Dropbox or Google Drive. Aside from the database, all data is saved. The schedule of the backup is free for you to define. The recovery option is accessible via a click from the backend. Additionally, the backups are available for download in the zip format, for example.

10web: Excerpt from the plugin list. (Screenshot: Noupe)

Image Optimization

We’ve been preaching this in a mantra-like fashion. If you want to boost your site’s performance, start with the pictures. It’s almost scary what kind of heavyweights are uploaded by clueless page operators every day, stressing out the visitor browsers as a result. 10web automatically optimizes the uploaded files during the saving process, allowing you to influence how extreme it should be. Aside from the automatic optimizations, files can also be converted from one format to the next one. The service even optimizes PDF files.

Apart from the mentioned services, 10web is currently working on a security solution that is supposed to protect your website from external threats and security gaps.

The theme supply is very moderate as of right now. However, the six designs cover all primary application cases, allowing you to create portfolios, magazine offers, or the typical business website.

The plugin supply also satisfies all basic application cases. Especially the frequent demand for photo galleries, sliders and forms is adequately covered. On top of that, you’ll find extensions for the integration of different social media, any additional external services, like the newsletter provider MailChimp, or the statistics solution Google Analytics, as well as ones for the development of your eCommerce activities.

10web: Preview of the included Gallery-Theme. (Screenshot: Noupe)

10web and the Pricing Model

The charm of 10web lies in its turnkey concept. Some plugins can even be found and used as free versions out of the WordPress index. The premium variants found in the 10web flat rate offer are much more feature-rich, however.

You choose from three different performance levels. You either go for monthly or the – cheaper – annual payments. You always have access to all features. The main differences are capacity-related.

The basic tariff for 12 USD a month lets you integrate three domains, optimize 20,000 images a month, and provides you with cloud storage for your backups with a size of 10GB. The standard tariff for 30 USD a month increases these parameters to 10 domains, 80,000 images, and 40GB storage. The premium tariff for a monthly 80 USD provides the offer for 50 domains. The optimizer will take in 250,000 pictures a month, and the backup service has storage of 140GB.

The cancellation procedure is fair. You can cancel the subscription at any point at the end of the period you already paid for. Of course, when choosing annual payment, that’s the end of the year, but you can also go for monthly payment, giving you a cancellation window every month. One peculiarity when comparing it to other providers is the fact that you’re allowed to use all plugins and themes even after your membership ends. You just don’t receive any further updates.

Conclusion: Get it or Not?

What am I supposed to do with three domains, is a question some private users may ask themselves. Whatever is my response. Just take the service and use it for one domain. 12 USD is no investment level amount. 20,000 images and 10GB storage will also be sufficient if you choose not to enter your own storage provider as it is.

I can’t really judge how many application cases for the more extensive offers really exist. When users administer between 10 and 50 domains, usually, there’s an established expert knowledge and standardized solutions. They probably didn’t wait for 10web.

What’s interesting, is the fact that, apart from the mentioned advantages, the entire management of the functionality for all domains can be taken care off from a single dashboard. This is reminiscent of a conning bridge. My regards to Captain Kirk.

The best choice would be to go and take a look at 10web for yourself. Create an account and test it for 14 days. That’s when you need to make a decision for (or against) a plan. A small downer is the fact that you need to enter credit card details at the beginning of the test stage already. Although I can understand that there are reasons for the provider to do this, there’s enough proof from others that it is not a necessity.

Let’s face it. Creating a WordPress theme from scratch for every new client is not economic these days. On the other hand, choosing a Premium theme on a per project basis is not economic either. Might Composer by Innwit be what you need?

The Tedious Route to Choosing the Right Theme

What you as a web designer need is the most thrifty way to create client projects. We are confident that this will inevitably lead you to the choice of WordPress. Our sister Dr. Web just conducted it a poll within its readership where they asked which CMS the readers actually use. It was an almost 40 percent win for WordPress, unsurprisingly.

Then, when you got settled with WordPress, you have to look for a theme solution that covers most of the possible project needs your client could confront you with. Sure, you could wait for the client to tell you what industry he’s in and what he wants to convey with his website. You will undoubtedly want to hear all of this.

But, then starting to look for a proper premade theme to customize afterward is not what I can recommend you to do. Premade themes, the free ones more than the Premium ones, need to be carefully reviewed before you adapt them for your clients. There is a lot of chaff out there between a tiny amount of wheat.

Cut Down on Avoidable Effort

Working for a client is a task that gets you paid. As most customers will only go for a fixed price contract, you will have to focus on keeping your efforts as low as possible to increase your income margin. The less energy you have to put into a project, the more you will earn.

Don’t get me wrong, however. I don’t advise you to cut down on critical effort and deliver low quality to your clients. That would backfire sooner than you’d wish to. What I encourage you to do is cut down on the avoidable effort that doesn’t directly benefit your project work and, thus, your customer.

And continuously searching for and evaluating new themes is such an effort that takes up way too much time without benefitting any of the project partners. So, do this job only once and wisely select a theme that is suitable for as many different project settings as possible. Then work into it thoroughly. Become an expert in using that theme.

The result will be remarkable. You have adopted a kind of website builder approach without the downsides of the large and growing website builders out there. You are still on the free and easy WordPress track, using the latest technology to accomplish the returning missions your clients want you to accept.

Choose One and Only One Theme

Before you settle for that one and only theme, you will have to go down a road covered in sweat and tears. You are about to enter the universe of multipurpose themes on WordPress, and that universe is enormous. Just like in the red light district of Amsterdam there will be a glitzy offer on every corner you pass. But beware, most of these offers only look tempting on the surface. Scratch off all the paint, and the gruesome truth will become visible. And, boy, will it be haunting…

Finding a one-stop solution is not easy. (Screenshot: Noupe)

This is what can happen with your multipurpose theme also. In fact, it is most likely to occur given the multitude of themes in that particular field. Yet, there are exceptions. Themes that actually deliver to their promise to be suitable for a wide variety of purposes.

Composer is Your Designer’s Business One Stop Shop

Say hello to Composer by Innwit. Composer is precisely one of the latter kind. It not only promises to be flexible to the point of no return, it actually is. Created by a team of developers from sunny Spain, Composer is not just an excellent Premium theme, but the best-rated theme in all of Envato Market. In fact, it is not only the best-rated theme on Envato Market but the best-rated product of all listed products no matter the category.

Did I mention that Envato Market sells way more than 35,000 individual items? No? Okay, now I did. I always like to listen to user opinions, once they exceed a certain quantitative degree which is undoubtedly the case here.

If you look deeper into it, you will find, that the most praised service, besides having an excellent product is the support Innwit delivers. While others give support, Innwit seemingly lives support. This will make your start with Composer even easier.

More Than 85 Ready-made Iterations of the Perfect Website

Let’s take a quick look to the side and at the website builders out there. Which ones are the most successful? Or put it in another way. Which ones are the most successful given that the usability is more or less comparable throughout all of them?

You are absolutely right. The answer is: The ones with the most templates to choose from. The sad truth is that clients on average are not too motivated to go for an utterly unique design approach for their representation on the web and instead like to stick to established standards regarding looks and functionality. You might bemoan that but after that, face it and get along.

Composer’s creators went a long way for you and thoroughly laid out more than 85 readily equipped websites from a vast variety of industries. Look through their showcase. I am sure you will quickly find a foundation for the site you have to design for Joe’s Pizza around the corner and Harry’s Barber Shop down the lane. You might even see a better representation for your own creative business. Yes, the team of Innwit is that good. There is not one local business you will not be able to put up an appropriately suitable and modern site for.

All of the more than 85 proposals can be imported into your WordPress installation to lay the ground for your further work. This is easy as you can view and install all of the concepts from right within your WordPress backend.

Not up to Premade Designs? Look at the Large Elements Library of Composer.

Taking a predesigned layout as the foundation, then altering it, might not exactly be what you thought, your freelance career would be all about. But just take a few things into account. Firstly, you design to make a living. The faster you make your living, the more you can live. Secondly, if you really feel the urge, Composer gives you all the freedom you need to design whatever out-of-this-earth design you want to create. Thirdly, we are in the WordPress ecosystem. Learning and evolving in this area is not wasted time. By digging deeper into Composer’s core feature, you will build up an expert knowledge that will allow you to break any boundaries real or perceived.

Putting aside all of the elaborately designed prefilled designs, we find a wealth of more generic template proposals for the more abstract-oriented workers among us. There is an ever growing amount of page elements such as headers, navigations bars, and widgets. The most useful design elements are what Innwit calls blocks.

Blocks will speed up your design. (Screenshot: Noupe)

These blocks which amount to more than 50 already, let you include standard patterns such as layouts for portfolios or magazines quickly, without introducing probably unwanted content elements as a by-catch. Besides these blocks, more than 100 page layouts help you to create the web project you imagined.

Composer comes bundled with several Premium add-ons. First and foremost there is the Visual Composer, one of the most prolific WYSIWYG design editors of the ecosystem, plus its separately sold add-on VC Ultimate. Then there is Slider Revolution for your image needs. This trio would set you back 71 Dollars alone, would you buy it outside of Composer.

In addition to that, Composer depends on a handful of other plugins to unleash all of its power. Setting it all up will cost you no more than three minutes max, promised. If you don’t believe me, watch this video:

Did you take the few minutes to watch the introduction above? If so, you will have noticed that Composer also comes with full integration of Google Fonts as well as a proposal for which fonts to use. Remember, you need not stick to Composer’s presets. You can turn any corner you want.

The Two Ways of Theme Customization

The Visual Composer will change the way you design. There is no doubt about that. Still, Composer as a theme sticks to the WordPress standards and lets you customize essential parameters of your layouts via the Theme Customizer.

In addition to that Composer comes with its own theme options submenu. Here you configure basic settings that have little to do with design in itself. Want a permanently visible search bar? Set in in theme options. Providing this more conventional method of parametrization saves you from having to do these tasks from the frontend environment that is more suitable for layout than for setting features on or off.

The List Continues…

The multitude of available header and navigation layouts will not leave you craving. There is enough for everyone. Altering colors is extraordinarily simple. Innwit tells us that there is not one known issue with other plugins. So you should not run into any problems.

Speaking of plugins, one of the most important ones out there is widely supported. I am talking about WooCommerce. Composer is entirely ready to sell for you.

If you need a website in a language not a lot of people speak or should you need RTL, Composer has you covered. The first issue is easily addressed by its support of WPML. The second is addressed by its built-in RTL support. Composer is certainly fully responsive and works on any device. For those roaming the web in HD, the theme comes with Retina support.

And, although I, personally, am not to keen on it, some might be happy to hear, that Composer comes with a mega menu of its own. This is widely customizable and admittedly looks quite impressive. So, use it, if you like.

Conclusion

Composer is what you’d call a Jack of all Trades. But it is one that does each job equally well and doesn’t fall short in any of them. Should you be looking for that one and only theme for all of your project needs, Composer might well be what you have been searching long and hard.

Composer is a Premium theme, yet only sets you back 60 Dollars as a one-off payment. There is no subscription whatsoever, so all future updates will reach you free of charge. Composer is under fully active development. Its feature set has almost exploded over the last months. Look for yourself.

The future is bright.

]]>https://www.noupe.com/wordpress/themes/composer-your-allround-wordpress-theme.html/feed1WordPress and the Featured Image: How to Avoid Problemshttps://www.noupe.com/wordpress/wordpress-and-the-featured-image-how-to-avoid-problems.html
Fri, 15 Dec 2017 05:30:33 +0000https://www.noupe.com/?p=103549]]>

Depending on the theme, the WordPress Featured Image can have a massive impact on your design. Especially if you forget it, or other problems come up.

The Post Image Itself

If you don’t know the term Featured Image, because you can’t find it in your WordPress backend, on the right of the text editor, your theme probably doesn’t support featured images. In that case, you’ll certainly run into one of the problems described below. And that will happen once you switch to a theme that uses featured images.

Featured images, also referred to as “Post Thumbnails”, are images meant to give a visual presentation of the respective post or page. Where and how they are displayed is decided by the used theme. This is one factor causing one of the problems described down below.

Post thumbnails don’t place themselves. Even if you uploaded all images that you want to use in a post, you have to choose one of them to use as a post thumbnail. This required step is not easy to internalize for some of us.

My Tiresome Experience With Featured Images

Does this seem familiar? You’ve published a post, and you forgot the post thumbnail. Now, your post is practically chanceless on social media. Thus, I went on a search for a proper solution to the issue.

Does this seem familiar? You’ve changed your theme, and your new theme works with different post thumbnail sizes. Now, your previous images look distorted. This is another problem I encountered not too long ago. Thus, I went on a search for a proper solution to the issue.

Does this seem familiar? You’ve changed your theme. Your new theme works with post thumbnails, but you haven’t used any until now. This makes your previous 500 posts look pretty plain. You guessed it. This is another problem I recently needed to find a solution for.

There is one less flexible, and one very flexible solution for the given problems. Let’s take a look at the less flexible one first.

The WordPress Board Solution to the Problem

With two code snippets, we can make sure that your WordPress always uses the first image used in a post as the featured image. This is better than not doing anything, but it’s not always the best choice.

For instance, if your theme shows the entire post image above the actual text when viewing the individual post, it doesn’t make sense to display the first image in the post, which also becomes the post thumbnail, twice.

However, if your theme only uses the post images as post thumbnails, like a preview for the teaser on the landing page, the snippet solution is one that might even be the superior choice.

Of course, make the changes locally, using the text editor of your choice, and upload the files back to your webspace via FTP. Don’t use the online code editors in the backend. Once you’ve downloaded the files you want to edit, make a copy, so you have a backup in case something goes wrong.

Once you have the changes online, the first image of a post will always be the post thumbnail. Nothing more, but nothing less either.

More Flexible Solution Via Plugin

With the solution I just presented, we get an automatic post thumbnail. However, we had to work on the code to do so, and it only got us a generalized solution. The post’s first image is always the featured image. What if that’s not what you want, or if you don’t want to work on the code?

Martin Stehle’s plugin is something like the Swiss army knife for WordPress post thumbnails. The plugin is free. You can buy a charged pro version with a lot more features for 14.99 (one site), or 79 Euro (infinite number of sites). The free version is enough to solve the problems described here, though.

Using the first content image as a post thumbnail does not require you to work on the code, and all you need to do is place a checkmark:

This is the easiest task for Stehle’s plugin. For my problems of the forgotten, and the nonexistent post thumbnails, it was sufficient, and took me less than five minutes. As usual, it is installed via the WordPress backend. After the installation and activation, you’ll find the menu item “Featured Images” on the left-side navigation, as you can see in the screenshot above. By the way, making the first content image the post thumbnail can be done in the sub-menu “Default Images”.

Information on the paid additional features of the plugin “Quick Featured Images” can be found here. In its Pro version, the plugin can not only turn the first content image into the post thumbnail but also remove it from the content, avoiding the double display mentioned above.

Finally, let’s get to the problem of the disproportional image display after a theme change. Here, we simply need to newly generate the post thumbnails, in order for them to match the measurements registered by the respective theme.

For this purpose, the plugin “Regenerate Thumbnails” by Alex Mills, is a good fit.

“Regenerate Thumbnails” is another free plugin and can be installed and activated comfortably via backend. The functionality can be accessed in different ways.

Under Tools > Regen. Thumbnails, you’ll find a single button labeled Regenerate all Thumbnails, and that’s exactly what it does. Here, the plugin uses the values entered under Settings > Media, as well as the values defined by the respective theme. If you want to be more selective, you’ll also find the option to newly generate preview images in Media > Libraryfor every individual image:

Conclusion: Use the Plugins

With two free plugins, you’ve taken care of the issues addressed in this article, and are also prepared for future theme changes. The plugins are also well taken care of, so I can fully recommend them.

You’ve probably created custom WordPress login screen for at least some of your clients. It sure wasn’t precisely super-easy. With the free Login Designer, you’ll be able to do this much faster from now on.

Good Idea: Adjusting the Login Screen Via Theme Customizer

The unique thing about Rich Tabor’s new WordPress plugin Login Designer is the fact that it seamlessly ties in with the WordPress Theme Customizer. This way, customizing your login screen works the same way as it already did with the theme.

I would even go as far as saying that the Login Designer allows any tard to build a nice login screen. It’s that simple. So, what can you, as a professional, get out of the tool?

How to Get the Login Designer

Download the Login Designer for free on Rich Tabor’s website ThemeBeans. Visit the linked page, and click on Free Download in the top right. This opens an overlay where you can enter an email address that Rich will send a download link to.

Shortly after, you’ll receive the according email. It contains the download link. Clicking it starts the download of the 2.6 MB zip archive with the Login Designer inside. Remember the zip’s storage location, and log into your WordPress installation.

The New Login Screen is in the Works in the Customizer. (Screenshot: Noupe)

Once you’ve arrived in the backend, switch to install > plugins. There, click on upload plugin in the top left, then click select file. Now, open Explorer, Finder, or your file tool of choice, go to the storage location, and select the archive login-designer.zip. Back in the backend, click on install now and be patient. In a short time, WordPress declares “mission accomplished”, and offers to activate the plugin, which you confirm.

By now, the Login Designer has found its way into the WordPress plugin index, allowing you to install it right from within the repository via the backend. Both approaches lead to the same result.

First Steps With the Login Designer

Under the menu item Design, you’ll find the sub-item Login Designer. Clicking on it opens the Theme Customizer, which the Login Designer has been tied in with, and shows you your current login screen.

To help your creativity, the Login Designer comes with two different templates, one of them in the popular dark style. The additional templates are not needed, though, as the Theme Customizer’s tools let you work right within the preview, and a click on each screen element opens the corresponding editing options.

The Final Result is More Interesting Than the Boring Default Screen. (Screenshot: Noupe)

After a training period of five minutes, you’ll already be able to create your custom login screen. As with other theme changes, you can save and publish your adjustments by clicking the designated button in the top left of the Customizer.

Getting Started With the Theme Customization API

Rich Tabor has looked deep into the Theme Customization API, and predicts a great future, as it can be used for improvements of both the theme and plugin development. Rich is surprised that rarely any developer makes use of the available possibilities. Maybe, we really should look deeper into it.

Now, if you’re curious to dig deeper, I recommend Rich’s article “Context-Aware Previews within the WordPress Customizer.” Here, Rich uses the Login Designer as a possible example, but gives a much more comprehensive presentation of the approach.

Conclusion: Login Designer is Good, Use it

To me, the Login Designer is one of those no-brainer plugins that should be installed, simply because it quickly produces impressive results. Incompatibilities are unlikely. So there’s no reason not to get it.

By the way, we release a lot of articles on fresh and useful WordPress plugins, and you can find the most recent one here.

A new WordPress theme framework has appeared, and in this article, we would like to give you an in-depth look at it. For theme developers, the Evolution WordPress Framework brings a lot of advantages. Bloggers and other site owners will enjoy the modern and clean design.

Introduction to the Evolution WordPress Framework

A screenshot of the Evolution demo page

I’ve had the idea of creating a perfect framework for the construction of new themes for a long time. There are a few things that were especially important to me during development:

Avoiding mistakes in updates

Absolute performance

Based entirely on WordPress Action Hooks

A clean and contemporary design

Automatic updates à la WordPress

An optimal WooCommerce support

Mobile First design

Optimal child theme support

Open source and free

In one year of development, I managed to achieve all of the above, and I’m proud of that. The result is a beautiful, fast, and safe theme, which can easily be used as a blog-oriented theme as well.

But the real merits of the Evolution WordPress Framework are hidden under the hood.

Important Links:

The Error-Proneness of Standard Theme Development

Every developer knows this problem: when using a parent- / child theme combination for website development, the error-proneness of parent theme updates increases drastically.

Often, template files from the parent theme are placed in the child theme folder and then edited. Overwriting templates is a common practice when it comes to WooCommerce development as well.

This is the root of the susceptibility. With more significant releases, WooCommerce faults outdated template files in the theme folder, which you will need to adjust by hand.

A standard WordPress theme doesn’t have that function. If there are conflicts here, they may result in white pages, due to major errors. But it doesn’t have to be like that. That’s not how to do modern theme development!

Evolution: Theme Development With WordPress Action Hooks

My entire Evolution WordPress Framework is based on these Action Hooks, as they provide incredible advantages. Once you’ve gotten a grasp of their functionality, you’ll be convinced that there is no better way to develop themes.

Let’s take a short look at the index.php of Evolution:

Evolution’s Index.php. Hooks without priorities are freely available to you.

By the way, Evolution is very well documented, as each template file refers to the used hooks, and the files that you need to look at for the revision.

Here, the index.php is vicarious for all template files. All of them use the Action Hooks – do_action( 'evolution_do_main' );, in this case. All relevant functions are saved in, and displayed by this Action Hook.

Don’t you know what the advantage is? There are two.

Complete update security

Infinite possibilities for theme development

Let’s take a closer look:

Working With the Evolution WordPress Framework

If you want to rework a theme on every page of your website, you need to throw a bunch of templates from your parent theme folder into the child theme folder.

All I need are two files. The functions.php and the style.css of the child theme. These two files allow me to rework an entire theme. And it’s not even difficult; you can do it too. However, the most important thing is the safety of a theme update.

The Absolute Update Safety of Evolution

When developing a child theme from a parent theme, two versions of a function are used. One is the function in the parent theme, and the other one being the overwritten version of the child theme. In many cases, this doesn’t end well.

I’ve experienced that before. Evolution is an entirely different thing. You don’t need to change template files, as you merely need to save a new function in the Action Hook.

An example: changing the comment form

The template file comments.php leads you to the right folder and the file with the functions used in the comments.php.

The file path would be the following: /inc/structure/markup/evolution-comments.php

Now, your new comment form is displayed, and updates of the parent theme won’t cause any issues, as your function is the only one left.

This way, you can quickly switch any function, and any content markup, without having to fear running into problems. And above all else: without touching a single template file. All you need to do is keep the right priorities in mind, to make sure that the display is correct.

Adding Additional Functions to the Action Hooks

Screenshot of the single.php of the Evolution Framework

If you want to add extra functions to the individual templates – like the single.php for example – that is quite easy to do as well. Get a short overview of the priorities, then create your function. The priorities 5, 10, and 30 are taken.

In this example, you can add it before the loop with the priority 8. This way, it is displayed after the opening markup, and before the actual loop. If you want to show it after the loop, assign a priority between 11 and 29.

Now, add content using your child theme’s functions.php. The priorities allow you to control the display. Start with the opening markup. If you want to use Evolution’s markup, your hook looks like this:

After that, you may add a function or a loop with the priority 10, and so forth… In the end, you need to add the closing markup.

The taken hooks can be found here: /inc/structure/evolution-hooks.php.

This way, you could exchange the parent theme’s entire contentwithout any update problems. The existing websites would merely be displayed differently. Cool, right?

The Performance of the Evolution WordPress Framework

Evolution was developed for maximum speed, as neither Google nor your visitors like slow websites. An optimization for real fast loading times begins with the code of the theme.

This is also the bottleneck of many multi-purpose themes. Due to the plethora of functions, most of which are not even used, the source code is bloated, and dozens of style and script files have to be loaded.

All of that slows down a website. Evolution is reduced to the essentials. If you want more, install according plugins. In the case of a theme change, this is an advantage as well, as all functionalities you’re fond of remain.

Evolution Speed Test

The Starting Position:

A fresh installation without any decelerating plugins (Yoast SEO only, no caching plugin!)

Evolution WordPress Framework: WooCommerce Support

What is a theme framework without a support of the popular e-commerce plugin WooCommerce? By the way, WooCommerce also works with Action Hooks. Thus, there is no reason to copy the plugin’s templates into the child theme to rewrite them. And this is the root of many issues with WooCommerce.

You can quickly delete existing plugin functions and replace them with your own.

Example WooCommerce Sidebar:

In the two most copied WooCommerce template files – archive-product.php and single-product.php -, you’ll find the following Action Hook:

At the same time, you’ll see the function that is hooked into the hook. This is the foundation for the next works. Now, register a sidebar for widgets, and name it »WooCommerce Sidebar«. Assign the ID »woocommerce«.

Now you’ve got a new sidebar on all WooCommerce pages, without having to touch a single template file. This works for all WooCommerce functions. Take a look at the templates (woocommerce/templates/), search for the Action Hook, and just exchange the functions.

By the way: the pages cart and checkout are no WooCommerce pages, but regular WP pages. This means, that the normal blog sidebar is displayed on them. You can either change that using the nosidebar.php template, or the plugin AH Display Widgets. The plugin lets you influence the display of certain widgets on specific pages.

Conclusion

Developing modern WordPress themes has never been easier. Update safety, clarity, and infinite options are all united in the Evolution WordPress Framework. On top of that, there’s the high speed. What more can you ask for?

Certainly. It’s Cyber Monday, and you can quickly amass smartphones, voice assistants, game consoles and loads of other gadgets. Boring. Fortunately, we have TemplateMonster to care for our professional requirements.

TemplateMonster Keeps Growing Steadily

Readers of Noupe Magazine have known TemplateMonster for years and years already. Often did we team up with them to bring our audience one fine deal and another. Over the last few years, TemplateMonster has seen a steady growth. Opening up for third parties transformed the platform into a full-blown marketplace where developers sell their own web products.

I said web products because the days when TemplateMonster was limited to themes and templates are long gone. Nowadays you still find themes and templates there, but also plugins and any other web product you might need. The international expansion has led to the inception of localized websites, support chains and blogs which widens the target audience to many more potential customers than a solely English platform ever could.

Treasure Trove for WordPressers

We here at Noupe Magazine have always admired TemplateMonster for their vast portfolio of high-quality WordPress Themes. Still, even after upsizing the product portfolio as a whole, WordPress Themes are the backbone of the service. Who’d wonder as WordPress is the most popular CMS of our globe? With TemplateMonster you’re sure to find the theme you are looking for.

Santa’s Bag

Christmas is just around the corner. Should you feel the need to build some x-massy landing page, the premium theme Santa’s Bag might just be what’s right for you. This theme comes aligned with the latest design trends and blows a breath of fresh air into an age-old tradition.

Carmen Design

If you’d like a very contemporary look for your creative business while still not having to invest too much unpaid time into it, TemplateMonster has you covered, too. Carmen Design conveys a solid personal and at the same time modern impression.

Speaker

This bold theme is for the self-exposer in all of us. Who isn’t calling himself a Speaker nowadays? There are more conferences and camps than anyone could ever seriously visit. Are you a part of this self-referential circle Speaker might just be the perfect fit.

Cyber Monday Saves You Munnay

With TemplateMonster Cyber Monday is not only on Monday but runs until the last seconds of the 30th of November 2017. Up until then, you can save massively. The whole product portfolio is discounted by 50 percent.

Many providers lure you in with the promise of massive rebates. Once in you find out that the promised massive discounts are valid only for the unattractive parts of their offering while the hot stuff still runs undiscounted. TemplateMonster follows a different path. Here, a 50 percent discount really means a 50 percent discount and is valid for the whole portfolio. Should you be most interested in WordPress Themes, check out their top seller’s page.

No coupon codes are needed as all products are transparently rebated right in the online shop. Just add them to your shopping cart and save big time. Happy sparing!

This theme’s name says it all. Royal Magazine is best used for magazine and news websites. The theme should also up the value of a blog. This theme comes with five widgets, lets you adjust the logo, the title, as well as the background.

Placid could be your blog’s next theme. It comes with own widgets and allows you to alter the background and the colors. Of course, you can also link your social networks with neat icons in the header.

Do you own a restaurant, a catering service, or a café? If yes, you should take a closer look at this theme. “Food Restaurant” has a unique design, and gets you access to all the important features that you’ll need for the presentation of your business. You get to customize the logo, the background, and the colors.

If you’re a blogger, check out this one. “Start Blogging” focuses on typography and individualism, and should be a beautiful theme with a few changes to the design. Edit the colors, upload a logo and set a background that suits your taste. You choose fairly freely, as the sidebar is able to assume 20 different positions.

The “Magazie Minimal” theme is sure to catch user’s eyes, as there are some design elements that I have not seen anywhere else. The interesting category display alone already makes the theme worth using. Once again, the theme allows you to alter the background, colors, and the logo.

The ads are bold, claiming that this theme was the best free e-commerce theme for WooCommerce. If that really is the case remains undecided. In any case, it comes with a plethora of features. For instance, it comes with a wishlist and a countdown for offers. It also provides tons of layout and color options, allowing you to adjust it to your liking.

The developers’ philosophy is soothingly different from the branch average. Here, you get a theme with the functional variety of an expensive theme, completely for free. The developers only get paid through premium support. Anima really provides a lot of features and functions. Colors, logo, Google fonts, different layouts, and so on.

WPThemeDoc by Rich Tabor is an HTML template that helps you write documentation for your WordPress theme, or any other project, really quickly, and in a contemporary fashion.

Simple, Elegant, and Quick Results

Rich Tabor’s HTML template WPThemeDoc is the base for all documentation of his theme provider ThemeBeans. Thankfully, Rich decided to make his template freely accessible to the public under the GPL license.

This is what a documentation with WPThemeDoc looks like.

Based on the fact that it’s an HTML template, you can also realize sites that don’t have anything to do with a WordPress theme documentation. The template is a good fit for any documentation. Do you document your client projects, for example? If so, WPThemeDoc is probably worth considering as well.

Common Variables Speed Up the WP Documentation

It is exceptionally well suited for WordPress users, because Rich has already prepared tons of variables relating to WordPress development in the HTML, allowing you to fill them with your own content via simple searching and replacing. Adding or removing more themes is very easy. Rich has worked with speaking IDs here. If you’ve dealt with the slightest bit of HTML before, you won’t struggle with this.

WPThemeDoc is Completely Free to Use as Open Source

WPThemeDoc is entirely free to use and available on Github. An example of the template in action can be found here. Take the easy way next time, use WPThemeDoc. Your client won’t pay you for your manufacture efforts anyways.

If a premium WordPress theme suits all of your customers, yet no design looks like the other, you might be using Pearl. Let’s take a more in-depth look at it.

The Budget Problem: Who Values Pure Handcraft, Anyway?

Let’s be honest. Who wants to learn a new theme philosophy for every new project? Given the vast variety of solutions on the market, developing custom themes is only worth it in the few cases where the client is either extremely peculiar, so his brand can’t be covered using standard solutions, or so generous that you don’t need to use standard solutions to cover him. In the latter case, you might still want to look for a suitable starting point aka premium theme.

Pearl: Landing Page (Screenshot: Noupe)

In all other cases, which would be about 99 percent, you’ll fall back on a theme or a theme framework, if the goal is WordPress as a CMS. The client cares about the visuals and features. He won’t build a shrine for you if you create a unicum.

Theme or Framework or Something in Between?

While pure theme frameworks sometimes force you to worship crude control concepts, classic themes often don’t provide enough application logic for a well-positioned creative worker. The new multi-theme Pearl by Stylemix takes the middle road. It’s close to a pure premium theme’s philosophy, yet it still provides various customization options, regarding both design and functionality. The creator calls Pearl a multi-niche theme, which basically means that it lets us cover a lot of typical client groups.

Pearl: The Jack of all Trades Among the Premium Themes

For getting started quickly, Pearl offers almost a dozen of demo pages, which others would call templates, for different branches, including restaurants, artist sites (even with selling options), portfolio websites, or the health sector. The demo contents can be imported directly into your Pearl installation. This way, you get a template that you can easily edit and turn into your own. Some demos are still in the works, so you can’t use them as of right now. In this context, it is good to know that the (low) price of the theme is a one-time payment that grants you access to all future updates.

The real variety of the Pearl theme is a result of the over 200 different available page elements, that you get to use to build your dream website. No matter if it’s about sliders (including Revolution), online appointments, audio or video players, table reservations, menus, price charts, or a shop based on Woocommerce; Pearl comes with all required elements.

This is what a typical company website made with Pearl could look like. But it it could look completely different as well. (Screenshot: Stylemix)

Pearl covers a lot of the functionality via popular premium plugins. The required licenses are included and don’t need to be bought separately. Stylemix also provides specific Pearl plugins for some features. For example, you’ll find the Header Builder, which is based on Angular.js, allowing you to create a website header that deserves its name. The same applies for the Pearl Mega Menu Builder, which lets you create flexible menu structures within your navigation. Amazon sends its regards.

Example of a Navigation Menu Made Using the Pearl Mega Menu Builder. (Screenshot: Noupe)

By the way, the developers also made sure that Pearl is compatible with as many plugins as possible. With other theme creators, you might run into some unpleasant surprises in that regard. I can remember dozens of cases where a plugin installation or a simple update caused a website to blackout entirely.

Aside from the variety of design- and function-related options, the fact that Pearl is capable of making all adjustments, either visually or in a dialogue, deserves a special mention. Manually interfering with files, like writing or rewriting code, is fully redundant. Thus, Pearl is not only interesting for creative workers but also an alternative for the ambitioned DIY’er who wants to build his website by himself despite all the tedious detail work.

In the backend of your WordPress installation, you’ll find an unusually broad access to the settings of the Pearl theme. Here’s where you take care of the basic parameters of your presence in such a detailed fashion that the only appropriate term to describe it is fiddling. This is the place for you to exert your control obsession meticulously. This does not only affect the typography, which you can edit using the hundreds of fonts from the Google Fonts Directory.

When it comes to the pages and your website’s posts, there’s an extensive WYSIWYG editor to help you out. It’s the popular Visual Composer by WPBakery, which has a price tag of 34 USD on its own. The Stylemix team did some work to the composer dashboard to grant you easy access to all Pearl modules.

The Visual Composer even lets you edit your website from within the frontend. However, if you, like me, have used WordPress since the beginning, you might be more comfortable with the backend editor.

The Performance and Support Are Nothing to be Ashamed of

Performance is one thing that Stylemix put a significant emphasis on. All benchmark services, such as GTMetrix, Google Page Speed or Pingdom, testify that the theme’s loading times are competitive, even without any further optimizations. I don’t think I need to point out that you can quickly ruin this score with three to four heavy cruisers right from your DSLR. In that sense, performance remains a continuous task, even with Pearl. The system itself is already optimized, though.

Out of the box, Pearl only supports the English language. However, the theme is fully WPML compatible, letting you create a localized version at any point. Speaking of support, I don’t want to leave out the extensive support the Stylemixers offer. There’s a 24/7 live chat available to the customers. Redeeming a classic support ticket is possible as well. Last but not least, users can help each other in the Stylemix forum.

In many cases, you won’t need this kind of help. Stylemix comes with an incredibly detailed written documentation, as well as a wide variety of tutorial videos. Pearl is pretty easy to handle, and all the videos are pure point-and-click presentations. Learning by doing is the name of the game.

Pearl: The Jewel is Not Expensive

The name Pearl was not just chosen because of how beautiful it sounds or how expensive the theme is. Instead, you’re supposed to open the theme’s shell and find your personal pearl inside. Romantic, isn’t it? Before we get sentimental, let’s take a quick look at how we can get to our new pearl.

Pearl is distributed exclusively via Envato’s Themeforest and comes in at only 35 USD during an introduction stage. If you were to purchase all the included plugins separately, you’d end up in the triple digit area.

However, I can’t tell you where the price will move to after this stage, and for how long the offer is still up. For its current price, Pearl is not just a real pearl in the ocean of premium WordPress themes, but a real steal on top of that. Take a look!

It’s time for a thorough autumn cleaning. We show you ten free WordPress themes that have just been released, and we guide you through the steps to create a proper child theme from whatever theme you choose.

Look For a Solid Starting Point

Of course could you start from scratch and create yourself a perfectly new WordPress theme beginning on an empty screen. I cannot imagine a case where this mode of operation would seem sensible to me, however. It’s much easier and more efficient to just choose a proper theme that fits your needs as closely as possible and then alter it to meet your needs perfectly. This is done by deriving a child theme from the original theme files. We will come to how this is done later on in the article.

WordPress Themes Galore: The 10 Best Free New Entries This Autumn

Let us first take a look at the hottest new entries in the free WordPress theme repository. As we know that our audience is international we will only feature themes that are translation ready.

1. Canuck

Canuck

Canuck is a modern theme in grid layout that can be customized to any look you like. Flexibility is its biggest benefit.

2. Mercia

3. Rinzai

Rinzai

Rinzai was originally created as a motor for food-related websites, foremost those that present recipes. Its strict grid layout and visual hierarchy support that usecase ideally. Rinzai can still be used for other projects, such as portfolios or even a corporate website.

4. Hestia

Hestia

Hestia offers quite a few child offspins already. Hestia adheres to the Material Design guidelines, thus sporting a very contemporary look. The theme is positioned towards creative workers in need of a totally flexible foundation to build any client project on. It is even WooCommerce-ready.

5. Neville

Neville

Neville is a very visual theme. It fits best with publications that want to draw their readers into the pictures they post. Generally any magazine could use Neville but as soon as you are lacking visuals the theme would be much less impressive.

6. Oblique

Oblique

Oblique attracts the viewer’s eye with its unusual aesthetics. Diagonal lines and asymmetrically cut images make for that special look you don’t see too often in our squares grid new world. As an example of how you can use Oblique as a corporate site take a look at one of the child themes named CoffeeIsle. Oblique is fully responsive.

7. HitMag

HitMag

Finding a usable magazine theme was painful in the past but is not anymore. HitMag is one of the most contemporary magazine designs that I have seen in quite a while. It’s not necessarily the best for highly visual sites but does a great job for just about any other publication thinkable.

8. Headstart

Headstart

Headstart is a very flexible theme for blogging and less dynamic websites alike. Its responsive design can be fully customized using widgets that carry almost any type of content you like. Build a dynamic blog oder build a static modern landing page. It will equally work great. Headstart is built upon the popular Foundation framework.

9. ClubFitness

ClubFitness

ClubFitness breaks with design conventions and is the most unusual new entry this autumn. If you like Pinterest ClubFitness might just be what you need. Its heavily card-oriented layout fits best with visually heavy websites. Despite its orientation towards images it runs perfect on mobile devices as well.

More Great Themes

What’s a Child Theme and How Do I Create One?

A child theme is the child of a full-fledged, regular theme as we’ve shown you ten of right above. It uses the files of the parent theme for display. This includes all template files, the style sheet for the design, the JavaScript – everything. That’s why both themes have to be in the theme folder wp-content/themes at all times.

Should you need more basic support with WordPress, I advise you to thoroughly read this great tutorial. It will have you covered.

All Changes Remain, Even After an Update

A newly set-up child theme looks exactly like its “parent” theme. This is the starting point for every customization of your design. From there, you can make any change you want, without any dangers, and these changes will remain even after an update of the original theme. That’s the big advantage.

Every WordPress theme that is capable of receiving updates should only be used with a child theme. It’s very simple, and in today’s article, we’ll show you the pitfalls that can break open.

The Preparation for Creating a Child Theme

To create a child design, you need an FTP program, as well as an HTML editor. You can get both for free. To work with the FTP program, you’ll also need the FTP access information for your web host. Your host will provide this information.

I can recommend the FTP program “FileZilla” as it’s feature-rich and free for both Windows and Mac.

The HTML editor I’d recommend is the program “Brackets.” It’s free as well, and due to its many expansions, it can be tailored to your needs.

Of course, there are other reasonable HTML editors. Thus, we have compiled a list of programs for Windows, and for Mac.

Creating and Using Child Themes

I’ll use WordPress’ popular Twenty Fifteen Standard Theme as an example for the creation of a child theme. You’ll learn to create a child design, use your own stylesheet for the CSS, and to adjust theme files. I will also introduce you to all tripping stones that may come up when working with child layouts.

1 – The Creation and Activation of a Basic Child Theme

A child theme only requires three things: the index to the parent theme, a style.css file, and a functions.php.

First, create a folder on your desktop, and name it “twentyfifteen-child.” Next, please create an empty file named style.css using the HTML editor. Enter the following into the CSS file:

The description that states that it’s a child theme of the Twenty Fifteen Theme

Under Template, you’ll find the “address” that your theme needs to be able to display the template files. It’s the name of the parent theme’s theme folder. When creating a child theme for another theme, of course, the folder name of your theme has to be included. So, if you need a child theme for the popular “Hueman” theme, this will say “hueman”.

Under Text Domain, your child theme finds the translation files, so that the theme will continue to be displayed in the language you chose.

Next, set up an empty file called functions.php. The following has to go into this file:

Optional: Create a Preview Image For Your Theme

Each theme has a screenshot, so it is easy to tell apart from the other themes in the dashboard. All you have to do for that is to set up a preview image with the name screenshot.png. This graphic goes into the folder of the child theme. There, it has to be placed in the main index, not in a separate folder.

The recommended size is 880 x 660 pixels. However, it will be displayed in 387 x 290 pixels. The large file size allows the screenshot to be shown well on retina screens. You may also use other image formats like JPG, or GIF, but PNG is recommended.

2 – Activating the Child Theme

Now, upload the folder twentyfifteen-child into the theme index (wp-content/themes) of your WordPress, and activate your new child theme under “Design => Themes.”

Now, the child theme is active. Thanks to the new screenshot, it is effortless to find within your theme index. Of course, there have not been any changes made to the design yet, so your adjustments will have to follow.

The Child Theme Right After the Activation, No Changes to be Seen.

3 – Customizing Child Themes – CSS

Now, write all adjustments into your child theme’s style.css. A few very simple adjustments would be changing the background color, the color, size, and font of the header, and so on. With just a few lines of CSS, we’ve already changed the theme’s design entirely:

4 – Working With Template Files

Your new theme is fully customizable, you can also use your own templates, or revise the files of the parent theme. WordPress checks the child theme folder for template files first. If there are none, the files from the parent theme will be used.

This means, that a file header.php in the child theme folder is being used, instead of the file in the parent theme. If you want to change the display of a specific file, just copy it from the parent theme into your child. Now you can either change the entire presentation or add specific elements only.

Two Examples: Changing Post Images and Static Share Buttons

Example 1: Reversing the Display of the Post Images

Copy the file content.php from your parent into the child folder. The original code of the file in the lines 14 to 27 looks as follows:

The buttons need two functions. Number one creates the buttons, and number two adds the required icon font “Font Awesome” to your header.

Part 2: The CSS

For the buttons to be displayed correctly, we need a bit of CSS. Depending on the theme, the width of the single buttons in line nine may need to be adjusted. I have already done that for our Twenty Fifteen child.

The correct position is still within the DIV .entry-content, right above the closing </div> tag.

The Final Result of Our Efforts:

We get these beautifully formatted share buttons with icons for Facebook, Twitter, Google+, the Facebook page, and a button that activates the browser’s print function.

The Static Share Buttons at the End of an Article.

5 – Now, Let’s Get Serious. Including Files

One of the pitfalls when working with child themes. Many clueless beginners fail this seemingly simple task, because the snippets from the web are always meant for independent themes. That’s why they can’t work.

If you want, or have to include a file, the internet will give you the following code:

require_once( get_template_directory() . '/my_included_file.php' );

This small tag tries to load a file from the parent theme. That’s where the child theme’s templates are located. As we overwrite the parent theme’s stylesheet with ours, the following tag has to be used instead:

require_once( get_stylesheet_directory() . '/my_included_file.php' );

The tag above searches for the needed file from the child folder. Thus, always use the get_stylesheet_directory() variant, and you’ll get the desired result.

Check every snippet from the internet, to see if it has been modified for this small difference.

6 – Adding Widget Areas

Additional widget areas are possible without any problems. For example, we could create an area that wasn’t meant to contain widgets – the footer. Add the following code to the functions.php of your child theme:

The Creation of a Child Theme From an Existing, Modified Theme

It is so much easier to create a child theme from scratch. However, if you have already modified your theme a lot, without having a child theme set up in advance, it’s still possible. You have to transfer all changes into the child theme to make sure that any updates to the parent theme don’t delete any changes.

Read the following steps, and follow them precisely. This is complicated, and hard work with a lot of fiddling.

First, make a backup of your theme. To do so, use your FTP access, and copy the theme folder to your desktop. Then, create a backup of that folder, and save it somewhere else. You’ll use one of the folders to work, while the other one serves as a backup if everything goes wrong.

Now, create a child theme, following the guide above. A folder, an empty stylesheet, an empty functions.php, and a screenshot.

Get yourself a fresh version of your theme that has not been modified.

Divide your HTML in the center, so that you can display the original file on the left, and the one from the modified theme on the right. Check every template file to see if you made changes.

Transfer all modifications from the functions.php into the version of your child theme.

The altered files belong into the child theme folder. Also, check if you have to swap get_template_directory() for. get_stylesheet_directory() Further information above.

Now for the part that is a bit tricky. You have to compare the fresh Style.css function with the file you altered. Maybe your HTML editor has a function that lets you compare the two files, pointing out the differences. That would be helpful. I have never needed this type of function. If it is not available to you, you will have to use your own eyes to compare the files. All changes go into its own style.css file. After that, place it into the child theme folder equipped with all modifications.

After you have put all altered theme files, and the extended CSS into the child theme folder, load the folder into your theme index wp-content/themes. Make sure that the fresh version of your theme is in there as well.

Log into your WordPress, and make your way to the themes. Use the live preview to check your newly created child theme. If everything is displayed correctly, you’re good. If not, check, in which areas you may have overlooked something.

Revise the missing elements.

Then, check the entire website, and all necessary functions again, using the live preview. If everything is fine, activate your child theme, and enjoy it.

Never do this again:-)

Conclusion

Now, you’ve gotten to know pretty much all important aspects of creating a child theme. Start by creating one based on one of the fine themes we presented you in this article. Which one is your favorite?

Blogging is getting more and more popular. An ever increasing number of people pick up this as a hobby or turn it into a profession. Of course, a blog needs an attractive, and clear theme, to turn visitors into loyal fans and make them come back.

Thus, today, I picked the ten most beautiful free WordPress themes for bloggers from the free theme index. Of course, all of these themes are responsive and work well with any screen resolution.

Serenti is clear, minimalistic blogging theme boasting a beautiful typography. You can use a custom logo, set the background color, choose different layouts for the display of the posts, and you also get a slider.

Magazeen Lite offers a lot for your blog. It provides you with three custom widgets for the newest posts, the most popular posts, as well as a widget for Instagram. On the main page, you can choose between grids or slider layout.

Certainly one of the most exciting themes for bloggers. Clear structure, and a perfect grid. You get a slider on the landing page, a section for “Featured Posts,” the option to use a custom logo, as well as set the background color. The theme is also prepared for a WooCommerce shop.

OdierLite provides you with a simple, minimalistic theme for purists. You get to use your logo; you can use a cool carousel for your highlighted posts, as well as set custom colors. The theme certainly is a good pick got posts that focus on larger post images.

Loose’s main selling points are its various functions and its unique design. For example, you get to choose the display of your landing page from three layouts. There are a lot of other options available too.

Zomer is clear, minimalist theme with a grid display of your articles. You can adjust the background colors and use an own logo. It also comes with an exclusive author widget. On each post’s individual page, the according post images are huge, making this theme a good pick for a photographer’s portfolio.

MH Purity Lite was created in the workshop of the German pro theme provider MH Themes. It displays your content as a mix of blog and magazine. You get to adjust colors, the background, and the header. On top of that, you receive two custom widgets: the “MH Custom Posts,” and the “MH Slider” widget.

ConsultPress is a blog theme with the design of a business theme. You can adjust a couple of details, like your logo, or background colors. For special purposes, you can also use the famous FontAwesome icons, as well as choose between a boxed, and a spacious layout for the display of your website.

Purplous Lite is a lovingly designed theme for bloggers with aspirations. You get to adjust the background, the colors, the header, and the logo. You can also link your social media channels in the header.

Conclusion

With a bit of searching, you’ll get a bunch of excellent themes for bloggers, Most of the themes are minimalistic but very interesting and pretty nonetheless. My personal favorite is the “Arouse” theme. Which theme is your favorite?